Cognitive forces consist of group members’ thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. These affect how everyone in a particular group perceives, interprets, evaluates, stores, and retrieves information, which in turn influences the group’s decisions. NASA officials who made the fateful decision to launch the Challenger shuttle apparently discounted the credibility of key information available to them at the time, and they drew incorrect conclusions from the data. They also wrongly believed that the shuttle system was sound, which made them overly confident in their ability to have a successful launch.